MODC_C01.qxd 12/13/07 1:40 PM Page 31 1 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels Introductory note Marx (1818–1883) and Engels (1820–1895) first met in Cologne in 1842, but their most productive working period was in Britain from 1845 on, in both Manchester and London. These extracts from The German Ideology (written, 1845–46; pub- lished, 1932) illustrate what they regarded as a materialist view of history in their first large-scale attempt to formulate the bases of their disagreement with the ideas of G.W.F. Hegel (1770–1831) and his imitators, the young Hegelians. Principally in his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), Hegel had conceived of the historical process as the working out of a dialectic whereby meaning and truth are never fixed entities, but are rather staging posts in a progress towards a basic unity or Geist (‘Spirit’) when there would be an absolute knowledge that the world was really an emanation of spiritual understanding or contempla- tion. Reason is an important tool in this, but it is only that: Geist is the highest form of enlightenment, and its attainment is the goal of all historical striving, a process of periodic Aufhebung, or upheaval/cancellation that introduces emergent social forms amidst residual practices – but the motive force is thought guided by reason. This reassuring sense of history, that it is a record of gradual improvement as Man develops an awareness of others, reflected well on much of the nineteenth- century’s rapid material progress, yet Marx and Engels were more struck by the unequal distribution of its benefits, and that history seemed to provide more of an account of material struggle and occasional decline. The theory of history they favoured is most clearly expressed in the Preface to Marx’s A Critique of Political Economy (1858–59), where a consideration of ‘material conditions of life’ is a way of understanding many abstract and apparently separate beliefs: ‘It is not the con- Downloaded by [The University of Warwick] at 03:40 13 October 2016 sciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.’ Furthermore, in order to be socially and materially productive (in ‘the social production of their life’), Man enters into ‘definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will’ (Karl Marx: selected writings, ed. David McLellan [1977], p. 389) The basic – and systemic – economy of life, how one produces and under what conditions, is the prime motive force, refracted within superstructural prohibitions and supposed freedoms allowed by legal and educational systems as well as religious codes. The Base determines human behaviour in ways that are often hidden from individuals by superstructural forces that give the impression that they are open to change and evolution; if they are, then their effect will not be significantly different so long as MODC_C01.qxd 12/13/07 1:40 PM Page 32 32 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels the capitalist system prevails. In many of the writings collected together in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (first pub. in 1932; trans. 1959), it is clear that Marx was struck by the alienation that the working classes experi- enced, a desperation so deep that it created a hopelessness about any changes to their condition. Appropriating the work of Ludwig Feuerbach, most consistently his views in The Essence of Christianity (1841), Marx and Engels drew a clear line between their investigations and the Enlightenment faith in rational self- improvement, noted in Rousseau and Condorcet as well as Feuerbach. The object of philosophy is to have a material effect on the conditions of life, not to accustom men and women to their lot. In the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) and Capital (vol. 1: 1867; trans. 1886; vols. 2 and 3: 1885, 1894 [ed. Engels]; trans. 1907, 1909), Marx and Engels developed their sense of the workings of ideology, its inevitable and pervasively restraining forces of containment. In short, history moves forward towards an eventual overthrow of this system through a process of dialectical materialism, that is, a set of antithetical turns, action and reaction, all conditioned ultimately by materialist concerns – and not in accordance with a rational and incremental grasp of the situation, where individuals can be sure to determine the course of events. The German Ideology never found a publisher in its authors’ lifetimes. (It even- tually appeared in 1932.) It is a clear expression of just what the ‘realism’ of their undertaking might be, how investigations should start at those social relations that determine how artists produce art, how it is distributed, how it is read or seen, and how it reflects a relationship to prevailing ideology. To this end, art can never be disinterested or simply created for its own sake. Artists may indeed believe that, but a materialist analysis will show that that is a faith that rarely survives the study or studio. Artworks have a place in a real world, and even the most spiritual senti- ments take a particular form in it, derived from actual labour in its production. Raymond Williams was to extend this sense of materialist perspective to the prac- tice of imaginative creation; the book is a product, part mental, part physical, and its presence in the canon (now) and on the bookshelves then as now, is not an effect of natural selection , but rather the effect of certain interests (see his ‘Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory’ [1973]). The raw materials for artistic production are transindividual, even if expressed in an apparently original way: ‘we have to break from the common procedure of isolating the object and then discovering its components. On the contrary, we have to discover the nature of a practice and then its conditions’ (Problems in Materialism and Culture [1980], p. 47). The most significant works are, therefore, not simply those that deploy Downloaded by [The University of Warwick] at 03:40 13 October 2016 strikingly original or complex art, but those that allow readers or spectators to realize the specificity of their historical situation and that strengthen a belief in collective human action and possibility. Cross-references 7 Fanon 9 Brecht 15 Foucault 18 Williams 21 Said MODC_C01.qxd 12/13/07 1:40 PM Page 33 The German Ideology 33 33 Jameson 48 Eagleton Commentary Louis Althusser, For Marx (1965; trans. 1969) Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, in his Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (1970; trans. 1971) Raymond Williams, ‘Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory’ – first given as a lecture in Montreal in 1973, then written up for The New Left Review, 82, (Nov.–Dec., 1973), and reprinted in Williams’s Problems in Materialism and Culture (1980), pp. 31–49 Williams, Marxism and Literature (1977) Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: narrative as a socially symbolic act (1981) Terry Eagleton, Ideology: an introduction (1991), especially pp. 63–91 William Adams, ‘Aesthetics: liberating the senses’, in Terrell Carver (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Marx (1991), pp. 246–74 Alex Callinicos, Making History: agency, structure and change in social theory (2004) Ross Abbinnett, Marxism after Modernity: politics, technology and social transformation (2006) The German Ideology PREFACE Hitherto men have constantly made up for themselves false conceptions about themselves, about what they are and what they ought to be. They have arranged their relationships according to their ideas of God, of normal man, etc. The phantoms of their brains have got out of their hands. They, the creators, have bowed down before their creations. Let us liberate them from the chimeras, the ideas, dogmas, imaginary beings under the yoke of which they are pining away. Let us revolt against the rule of thoughts. Let us teach men, says one, to exchange these imaginations for thoughts which correspond to the essence of man; says the second, to take up a critical attitude to them; says the third, to knock them out of their heads; and – existing reality will collapse. These innocent and childlike fancies are the kernel of the modern Young Hegelian philosophy,1 which not only is received by the German public with horror and awe, but Downloaded by [The University of Warwick] at 03:40 13 October 2016 is announced by our philosophic heroes with the solemn consciousness of its cataclysmic dangerousness and criminal ruthlessness. The first volume of the present publication has the aim of uncloaking these sheep, who take themselves and are taken for wolves; of show- ing how their bleating merely imitates in a philosophic form the conceptions of the German middle class; how the boasting of these philosophic commentators only mirrors 1 Exemplified by Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity (1841) and Max Stirner’s The Ego and its Own (1844), the Young Hegelians regarded human action as the result of an unfolding of mind or spirit (Geist), a potential that, eventually, could be said to guide all action and material development. MODC_C01.qxd 12/13/07 1:40 PM Page 34 34 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels the wretchedness of the real conditions in Germany. It is its aim to debunk and discredit the philosophic struggle with the shadows of reality, which appeals to the dreamy and muddled German nation. Once upon a time a valiant fellow had the idea that men were drowned in water only because they were possessed with the idea of gravity. If they were to knock this notion out of their heads, say by stating it to be a superstition, a religious concept, they would be sub- limely proof against any danger from water. His whole life long he fought against the illu- sion of gravity, of whose harmful results all statistics brought him new and manifold evidence.